Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method for managing resources and balancing loads in a computer cluster or a cloud, and more particularly, for joining virtual environments, such as Containers, residing on different nodes of the cluster in order to optimize loads and resource usage.
Description of the Related Art
A modern trend of virtualization presents some challenges with regard to resource usage by Containers and VMs, especially if they are running on nodes of a cluster or in a cloud structure. Conventional cluster systems have VMs/Containers running on a physical node and using resources of that particular node.
This conventional arrangement has some obvious shortcomings in terms of either overloading some nodes or wasting resources on some other nodes of the cluster. For example, a node has certain CPU and memory resources and the Container is launched on the node. The Container uses up all available CPU time, while some memory is still available. Thus, the extra memory is unused and basically wasted, because it cannot be used by another Container even on the same node (since there are no CPU resources left for launching another Container), not to mention by other Containers located on different nodes of the cluster. There is a need in the art to have a system where the Containers residing on a cluster node can use resources available on other nodes of the same cluster in order to optimizer resource usage and balance the operational loads.
Accordingly, a method for joining Containers residing on different nodes of a computer cluster in order to optimize resource usage is desired.